I really enjoyed this. The premise is intriguing: rather than break up the family, a Nepalese man's wife invites his mistress to come and stay in their apartment. All the characters were fully drawn and their actions understandable, and I could feel sympathy for each one. Most impressively, the author is able to seamlessly integrate the culture and conflict of Nepal in the nineties into the story. That's a difficult task and many writers can't manage it and their books wind up sounding more like social studies textbooks than novels.

I've always been fascinated by Nepal, but I hadn't known much about it before. This book increased my knowledge a great deal as well as telling a touching story, and I think I would read this author again. ( )

My Nepalese read was by an author who has settled in the US, but spent his childhood (until the age of 21) in Nepal, and the book is set in Kathmandu. The Guru of Love is the story of a middle-aged teacher (Ramchandra) who falls in love (or lust) with a student. His wife initially leaves him, but decides instead to live with her husband and his lover. The book attempts to look at Ramchandra's disintegrating certainties about life, and his battles with conservatism and propriety in the face of doing what he knows is right. It is set in a Kathmandu at the boiling point of political unrest.
If it sounds like my descriptions of the plot are a little half-heared, it may be because I couldn't work up the enthusiasm for a book that was pretty awful from start to finish. The characters are terribly fleshed out, unsympathetic or unbelievable, and the menage a trois so comfortable as to be trivial. The family picture is completed by a smug brother-in-law and parents-in-law bordering on evil, all of which felt hackneyed. The attempts to include Nepalese politics and social unrest felt ham-fisted, and it seemed to me that Upadhyay was trying to give depth to a boring (to me, anyway) sexual situation by throwing in a few whiffs of local colour and hoping to pass the whole thing off as being somehow interesting because of its exoticism. In fairness, it was a quick read (2 sittings) and gave occasional glimpses of something deeper, such as in Ramchandra's relationship with his maturing daughter, but ultimately, not a recommendation from me.

The text is deceptively simple. So much so that I almost stopped reading after the first 50 pages or so. But then the descriptions grabbed me and I became immersed in the foreign setting and characters. The book traces the story of a marriage tested by the husband's infidelity. Though the specific reactions of the characters did not fit my own expectations for what people would do in the same situation, the emotional power was real. ( )

This started out and seemed to me like it was going to be another tale of a foolish mid-life man throwing his life away because he has an affair with a younger woman. But it turns out to be far more subtle than that, and the novel turns out to be a fascinating exploration of families and how they interact, set against the backdrop of the pro-democracy movement in 1990 in Nepal. I found this book really compelling, with realistic and interesting characters set against the backdrop of a richly detailed evocation of life in Kathmandu. ( )

Not since Rohyntyn Mistry have I found someone who understands family dynamics (and the interplay of money and power and love) as this author does. Ooops, I take that back. He's definitely not as good as Rohyntyn Mistry. But I didn find the WIFE in this book to be a very sympathetic character ( )